Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.76 (667 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0553418815 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-12-06 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
This book is wise, fierce, and desperately necessary.”—Jordan Ellenberg, University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of How Not To Be Wrong“O’Neil has become a whistle-blower for the world of Big Data… in her important new book… Her work makes particularly disturbing points about how being on the wrong side of an algorithmic decision can snowball in incredibly destructive ways.”—TIME“O’Neil’s work is so important… her book is a vital crash-course in the specialized kind of statistical knowledge we all need to interrogate the systems around us and demand better.”—Boing Boing“Cathy O’Neil, a number theoris
in mathematics from Harvard and taught at Barnard College before moving to the private sector, where she worked for the hedge fund D. E. She earned a Ph.D. She then worked as a data scientist at various start-ups, building models that predict people’s purchases and clicks. O’Neil started the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbi
Stop Using Math as a Weapon Amazon Customer So here you are on Amazon's web page, reading about Cathy O'Neil's new book, Weapons of Math Destruction. Amazon hopes you buy the book (and so do I, it's great!). But Amazon also hopes it can sell you some other books while you're here. That's why, in a prominent place on the page, you see a section entitled:Customers Who Bought This Item Also BoughtThis section is Amazon's way of using what it knows -- which book you're looking at, and sales data collected across all its customers -- to recommend other books that you might be interested in. It's a very simple, and successful, ex. "They back up their analysis with reams of statistics, which give them the studied air of evenhanded science." I struggled with the star rating for this book. There are certainly aspects of the work that merit five stars. And it is VERY thought-provoking, like a good book should be. But there are flaws, significant ones, with the biggest flaw being a glaring over-simplification of many of the systems that O'Neil decries in the book. I don't know if O'Neil has personally ever had to take a psychology test to get a job, worked under the Kronos scheduling system, lived in a neighborhood with increased police presence due to crime rates, been victimized by insurance rates adjusted to zip codes. "WMD offered insights into some of the threats posed by Big Data" according to Tim. The book looks at the black box algorithms and their misuses. It starts strong, but becomes a repeat of the same story line in late chapters. It definitely gave background of the dangers of Big Data in a number of industries, and painted the grim picture of how this is impacting society today.I am a high school statistics teacher and this afforded me the opportunity to engage my students in discussions of ethics related to many situations found in this book.It was an enjoyable, if disturbing, read.
Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student can’t get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), he’s then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated.But as Cathy O’Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a “toxic cocktail for democracy.” Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.Tracing the arc of a person’s life, O’Neil exposes the black box models that shap